Introduction
This interview with Ram Dass was first published in Nature & Health, Vol. 9 No. 4 (Summer 1988), under the name Miles Bennett, a pseudonym used by the author at the time. With the author’s permission, we are pleased to republish it under his real name, Professor James Bennett-Levy.
In the decades since this conversation took place, James has become a respected psychologist, educator, and researcher, and has more recently contributed to several of Australia’s pioneering psychedelic-assisted therapy clinical trials.
Republished today, this interview offers a fascinating historical snapshot of Ram Dass during a pivotal period in his life and work—before the modern psychedelic renaissance and nearly a decade before the stroke that profoundly reshaped his teaching. It captures an important moment in the evolution of psychedelic culture and contemplative practice, while exploring enduring themes of consciousness, compassion, service, mortality, and the integration of psychedelic experience that continue to resonate today.
We are honoured to preserve and share this important piece of psychedelic history with a new generation of readers, ensuring that conversations like these remain accessible as both a record of their time and a source of continuing reflection and inspiration.
Foreword to the 2026 Republication
In the early 60s, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner spearheaded the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Leary and Alpert were fired in 1963 for blurring the lines between researcher and subject, and for administering psilocybin to undergraduate students. Fascinated by the different paths that each had taken since that time, in 1987 I asked Neville Drury, the editor of Australian magazine Nature & Health, if I could interview them on the magazine’s behalf. Neville said ‘yes’, so I had the good fortune to interview all ‘the Harvard trio’ over the space of a week. By that stage, Metzner was Academic Dean at the California Institute for Integral Studies, doing seminal work with MDMA-assisted therapy. Leary was living in Hollywood with his film star wife. And Ram Dass was … being Ram Dass.
Ram Dass was as delightful in person as he appears in videos. Despite my somewhat gawky questions – this was my first journalistic experience – he was unfailingly kind and generous with his time. By this stage, he was no longer just a meditation guru. Now he had immersed himself in social action: supporting people with AIDS in San Francisco, teaching meditation to long-term US prisoners, and curing blindness in Nepal via his work on the board of the Seva Foundation. Above all, what impressed me most was how human he was. No airs and graces. He soon put me at ease. Breakfast with Ram Dass was like talking with an old friend.
Original Foreword (1988)
The following foreword appeared in the original 1988 publication and is reproduced here unchanged.
Twenty-five years ago, two professors of psychology, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, became the first academics to be dismissed from Harvard University in 100 years. Their crime: experimenting with the mind-manifesting drug LSD.
Ram Dass – the former Richard Alpert – is now one of America’s most influential and best loved spiritual teachers. He is a man of enormous warmth and humour, who has forsaken LSD for meditation, and the academic life for service.
After leaving Harvard, and collaborating in further research with Leary, Alpert journeyed to the East in the mid-60s, where he studied under his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. He re-emerged with a new identity, Baba Ram Dass, and a glorious book of eastern spirituality meets western psychedelia entitled Be Here Now.
In the 70s and 80s, Ram Dass has become more involved in social issues – the Peace Movement, death and dying, AIDS, and two charitable trusts, the Hanuman Foundation and the Seva Foundation. He has written six books – Be Here Now, The Only Dance There Is, Journey of Awakening, Grist for the Mill, Miracle of Love, and How Can I Help (with Paul Gorman) – to go with three earlier works co-authored by psychologist Richard Alpert (including The Psychedelic Experience with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner).
Ram Dass was midway through a 60-date, across-America lecture tour on behalf of the Seva Foundation when Miles Bennett caught up with him for breakfast in San Francisco.
The Interview
James: You started off your working life as a professor in psychology at Harvard University – what happened?
Ram Dass: The key turning point in my life was when Timothy Leary gave me psilocybin on March 6th 1961, when we were both Harvard professors, and it blew my mind. What it showed me – and thousands of others – is that I wasn’t who I thought I was, and it showed me a place in myself, or a quality in myself, behind the way I knew myself to be, the way I thought I was. It was as if all the models I had, all the definitions, all the roles, all the concepts, got laid aside and behind it all I just found myself being.
Another thing I noticed was that when I was in that space, when I looked at forms in the universe, I was awed by the preciousness of them. And I looked with wonder at everything from a blade of grass to a rusty old tin can. I experienced at that time incredible love and compassion towards everything. And the thing about it was that it felt incredibly natural and familiar to me, even though as an adult I had never experienced that space before.
And that familiarity felt like I was at home in the deepest sense. Well, after a few hours I came down and I had it as a memory. And at first – and for the first couple of hundred trips after that – I assumed that the chemical was taking me someplace other than myself, because I identified primarily with where I started from, not where I went each time. And then I kept noticing how familiar that place was to me, and it began to dawn on me that that was my natural identity, and that what had happened was that in my zeal to get socialised in this incarnation I had bought into a model of myself that kept narrowing who I was and that I couldn’t get out from under so easily. And I saw that my high was my natural state, and I got interested in why you come down. That became my focus of attention.
Then I started to meditate. And I saw that what brought me down was the attachment I had to my own thoughts. So you try to unglue the sticky fingers of thoughts and you do that through meditation.
James: How did you come to get interested in meditation?
Ram Dass: Of course, I was a psychologist, and what I had noticed was how psychology was always concerned with the content of thought. Gradually I began to realise just how much Buddhist psychology was concerned with the mechanics of thought. And I was very drawn to Theravada Buddhism because it was so austere, with so little religious overlay, just a simple practice. I started serious meditation in 1970. Every year I would spend ten days or so meditating, then more recently three-month courses. I always kept being drawn back because I saw that the root work was the attachments in my own mind.
But every time I’d be deeply involved in meditation, there was a way in which my guru (Neem Karoli Baba) undercut that, and would remind me to feed people and serve people if you want to know God. And when I’d say ‘I want to meditate’, he’d say ‘If it’s your whimsy’! The second time I saw Maharaji he said ‘You know Gandhi?’ And I said ‘Yes’. And he said ‘You be like Gandhi’. And I think I’ve been trying to hear that without choking on it for a long time.
So the two forces in my practice have been service and meditation – work on the mind – both of which fit in with my psychological history. When I was doing it ten years ago, what I would notice was that the meditation practice would quiet the mind, but my heart would get very dry and then I’d want to break out of it. Now most recently something changed in me from where I’m doing it so that when I end up like in Burma (where Ram Dass went on a three-month meditation retreat) I ended up with a very, very deep quality of openness of heart, but not the romantic one. I’m learning about going beyond the emotionality of it into the Shiva love, a fierce ‘fire love’ you might call it. It’s a love that looks at death and looks at suffering and says ‘Yes’, and the heart is still open.
James: So psychedelic drugs started you off on a spiritual path. But how do you think others have dealt with experiences, mystical or otherwise, that they might have had using LSD?
Ram Dass: I think for a large percentage of people who took psychedelics, the psychedelic experience was so discontinuous from their regular life that later they just rejected it, and felt ‘Well it’s a hard world and I’ve got to get it together’. And so they pushed away the insights. A smaller percentage – a lot of people like me – have attempted to integrate the two worlds together over the years. I have a sense now that there’s a kind of lurking malaise among people who rejected it, that they threw out something – the expression is the baby with the bathwater they lost something by rejecting it. The kind of cynicism about ‘All that was just idealism’, something was inside them, something did happen, and how it creeps out in other forms is interesting. That’s part of what my whole business about compassion is about, to see if I can find a way for it to creep out. And my audiences are primarily people who are trying to integrate those two worlds.
The common thing people say is: ‘You know, I read your book 20 years ago, and it really changed my life. It’s great to see you doing what you’re doing and seeing you around.’ It gives them faith that everything they thought was something turns out to be something. I’m reassuring in that I represent continuity where they’ve experienced discontinuity.
James: Over the past ten years you’ve been very involved in Death and Dying work – running workshops, giving talks and so forth. How did you come to get interested in this?
Ram Dass: I became involved in that way back. I think it was Aldous Huxley who turned Tim Leary and I on to The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Ralph Metzner and Tim basically did the manuscript, and I was part of the gang – it was Ralph’s intellect and Tim’s vision that did the book. But what we found was that what The Tibetan Book of the Dead was describing was very similar to the experiences we were having with drugs. So we started talking about a death-rebirth experience, which Aldous supported.
I found that from being in India and around death there so much, I could feel that the whole attitude towards death was entirely different in the East to what it was in the West. I came back and it struck me how intense was the fear of death in this culture and I really saw that wasn’t the case in the East. The philosophical context of karma and reincarnation made it an entirely different experience. I started to talk about death in my lectures and I said that we should have a Benares of the West, a place where people could come and where death was seen as a transitional space rather than the end of things.
And then the hospice came along, which was an in-between place, and a psychological support system, but not a spiritual support system, so there was still plenty of space and then Steven Levine took it over. I kept moving towards being a generalist, more a social philosopher, and I said to Steven ‘You want dying, you take it’, and he did. He ran with the ball and did beautiful work with it.
Then six years ago we started the Dying Center in Santa Fe, which never realised its potential. My plan was that if there were people like me who wanted to use their dying to awaken, and people like me who wanted to be around dying people to awaken, we put the two of them together and we create ashrams in which people die. But they would primarily be ashrams, not dying centres. So the stuff they would do together would be work on dying, but the general tone of it would be like an ashram. But we haven’t pulled it off yet.
There are a lot of seeds I planted in the culture … like I wanted private prisons where the guards were all trained as yogis, where they got up at four o’clock in the morning, and everyone prepares their own food. I said that if people have to be in prison, all that society requires is that they’re kept out of the mainstream; no rehabilitation programmers work very well, so how about ashrams out of prisons. They give you food and clothing and then you can create whatever reality you want. I’ve spoken to a lot of prisoners saying: ‘You can buy the reality of “You’re in Prison” or you can create the reality that you’re in a monastery and if you guys all do it together the only people left in prison are the guards and then you can help them! And we did Inside Out, two volumes given away free in prisons, tens of thousands of copies given away all over the world – a book which says ‘If you’ve got to serve time, use the time to get free of time’.
I’ve been put down a lot over the years for being too eclectic, a kind of dilettante of spiritual practice, people saying: Why don’t you do just one thing? If I were doing just one thing it would be my relationship with my guru because he was … he didn’t give you any training, he was just there. And the trainings were the littlest trainings, ‘Give up anger’, ‘Serve people’, ‘Give up money’, ‘Give up sex and you’ll know God’ – stuff I’ve always railed against. He comes out of such a wildman tradition, it’s called the Avadu, the formless yogi, without form. So in a way it’s left me free, and he was constantly encouraging me to trust my heart and my own judgement about things, so it’s thrown me back in on myself. I’ve gone from being in the Harvard days a real worshipper of the analytical mind to being very deeply committed to my heart-mind now. I no longer try intellectually to justify what I’m doing, nor do I make it logical or sequential. Linearity doesn’t appeal to me so much anymore, although I still remain pretty linear!
James: Now you’ve turned to working with people with AIDS. What are you doing?
Ram Dass: There are really two things I do. In Boston I work with the AIDS Coalition and I help in the training of support systems for AIDS workers, and help them not get so caught up in the melodrama, so dramatising their roles that they get burnt out. Learning how to be open to another human being. With the AIDS patients, it’s just like my dying work. It’s staying conscious in the midst of a tremendous amount of anger and fear, suffering and confusion, and really just loving them and being present with them, holding them, sometimes giving them money, discussing with them different treatments, dying, what happens after death, sometimes just putting compresses on their head … just one-on-one being with them. It’s as heavy as situations get for people. Most of these people already have a tremendous amount of guilt and there’s something in the personality structure of the gay community that feeds on this thing, so that there’s this double-whammy that’s really heavy duty, and it’s interesting to try to unsnarl that with another human being.
James: So what is your model of what happens at death?
Ram Dass: In my heaviest acid trips and most profound meditations, there have been moments when I have felt I was losing control. The whole thing was going so fast, or I couldn’t grab it, or my mind was letting go – and then I would either black out for a moment or else I would just flick in and I’d be through. And then I couldn’t believe that I’d been so frightened a moment ago, because what I’d been frightened about was just something that my mind had created. And that’s exactly what I experience the process of death as like – it’s like a big acid trip! If your mind is quiet and you just say ‘Here it comes’, and you keep on surrendering and surrendering and surrendering, and opening and opening and opening, and you stay conscious, the train of consciousness doesn’t have to break, and you just go right on through. Most people black out.
Ram Dass, Growing with Suffering (lecture, c. 1980s). Courtesy of the Be Here Now Network. Source: YouTube
James: And what lies beyond death?
Ram Dass: First of all there’s awareness and the awareness has unique qualities about it until you are really quite cooked, like a Buddha. You are still a separate awareness with a sense of your own separateness, and it’s interesting because your brain is being eaten by worms at that time and yet you’re still somebody who knows yourself and knows your predicament as an entity, and recognises people you knew. So obviously all that isn’t stored just in the brain cells, because they’re gone but you are still around.
That always interests me because the whole business of right brain/ left brain seems so reductionistic, and the fact that consciousness has always eluded psychology in the West delights me. When I look at all of the correlations in personality and cognitive research, and see that they always run around 0.5, which means that they account for 25 per cent of the variance which means 75 per cent of the variability is what they call error – well that leaves plenty of space open for karma, reincarnation and all the other kinds of stuff. I don’t think science has voted us out yet in its zeal to find a material correlate, an isomorph for everything!
I feel that beings exist on many other planes in subtle forms without bodies, with awarenesses, with different kinds of bodies of light forms, of ideational forms; that just as we create the solid stuff with the way the mind organises whatever is out there, so the mind keeps creating realities of other kinds and other places, and that we keep doing it in subtler and subtler ways.
It’s like Aldous Huxley once saying to me that he loved jewels because they reminded him of pebbles on other planes! So I think that that William James’ quotation that our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness – I really hear that, and I think these other planes of consciousness are also planes in which there is not an identity between a physical and a consciousness state: that awareness is not in time and space. Who we are is not in time and space. Who we think we are is in time and space. And the whole ego structure which the West worships is a creation of mind. It reduces us, it imprisons us in our own minds, and keeps reducing us into a whole lot less than who we are.
I have a sense of vastness in my being and no time, and I don’t feel like I’m old or any of that stuff – that’s all totally irrelevant to me now. I’m just here. And I remember that more and more of the time all the time, and I can imagine that by the time I die, whenever that is, that I’ll just be right here and the body will just be disappearing and I’ll just be here. And then it’ll be interesting to see what happens! I can give you thousands of scenarios. I notice that different beings go to different places depending on where they thought they were going when they went out. So the mind keeps creating that stuff afterwards.
One of the big things you say to people after they die is: ‘You died. You should know that you died and go on, it’s OK. You have died even though you think you haven’t died because I’m still here.’
James: This notion of mind creating realities leads on to something I was going to ask you about – the hip phrase of the 80s ‘Creating Your Owti Reality’. In what sense can we create our own realities? For instance, can we create realities in which we can fly?
Ram Dass: The tradition that I have, having lived with my guru so much – Christ’s statement ‘Had ye but faith, you could move mountains’ – is literally true. And I think that when you say it that way, you think you can fly, but then you drop … it’s because you just think you can fly. It doesn’t lock in so that ‘flying happens’, which Don Juan in the Castenada books relates.
But having been with Maharaji, I realise now that a lot more is possible for the human individual in terms of the relation of mind to matter than we in the West ever give credence to, because we’re always seeing whether it’ll work, we’re always in an experimental mode which is about doubt, questioning the depth of faith.
One of the many stories about Maharaji (Ram Dass has over 1000 in his book on Neem Karoli Baba, Miracle of Love) is of the man driving the car with Maharaji in it. And they come to a bridge. And the guy stops the car because coming across the bridge the other way is an oxen pulling a wagon with sugar cane on it, and it’s only a single lane bridge. And Maharaji says: ‘What are you doing? There’s no need to wait, put your foot on the accelerator, close your eyes and go ahead.’ And in India the guy did it. We wouldn’t do it. This guy was 60 and he completely trusted Maharaji. Then Maharaji said: ‘You can open your eyes now’, and the wagon was behind them, and they were driving down the road. Now, where did that come from? What level of faith is that?
And as I kept allowing the possibilities in, there was a little flick. What I’ve got is an amalgam of things that have happened directly to me, then all the interviews for the book, and all the other literature … and I began somewhere along the way to open Pandora’s box and say ‘Yes it is all possible’.
What the Buddha said about the mind creating and interpreting … it’s like this. The fact that you see a hand in front of you is such a conceptual overlay of so much stuff going on in your head because all you are seeing is shadow. How do you know it’s not part of that? All that apperception and all that process … and when you sit and meditate, and get focused enough, and then you watch that happen, you can’t believe that what you see is a phenomenon of no description; and then you see the mind go out and grab it and conceptualise it. When you get that subtle in your mind, you begin to have a tremendous sense of the way in which each person is organising the universe with the reality that they are living in. And you can feel the conspiracy of thought that creates the environment in which nuclear bombs exist. You can feel that happen. It’s a conspiracy of perception.
Ram Dass at a lecture in Hawaii, 1974. Image courtesy of the Love Serve Remember Foundation. Source: RamDass.org. Photographer unknown
James Bennett-Levy is an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney, and a leading researcher on the training of psychotherapists. He has published 5 co-authored books on psychotherapist training and clinician skills, which have been translated into 12 languages. Over the past 6 years, James has had involvement with 4 of Australia’s first psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) clinical trials. He has contributed to the training of prospective PAT therapists on 3 of those trials; been a chief investigator on 2 trials; and been a therapist on one trial – psilocybin-assisted therapy for prolonged grief. Recently, James has been one of the authors of a paper suggesting the importance of PAT therapists having some personal experience of PAT (Negrine et al., 2026).
- An interview with Ram Dass - July 10, 2026
